Ingathering - The Complete People Stories

by Zenna Henderson

  “How’d you get the wood to burn?” she finally asked. “It was wet. ‘S’all there is left.”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “I heated the stove.”

  “Thanks,” said Glory shortly (not even being surprised that I could do a thing like that!).

  We both listened to the murmur of the rain on the roof and the pop and creak of the expanding metal of the stovepipe as the warmth reached upward.

  “I’m sorry,” said Glory. “I shouldn’ta spoken so short the other night, but I was worried.”

  “It’s all right,” I said magnanimously. “And when my People come—”

  “Look, Debbie.” Glory turned her back to the stove and clasped her hands behind her. “I’m not saying you don’t have folks and that they won’t come some day and set everything right, but they aren’t here now. They can’t help now, and we got troubles—plenty of troubles. Seth’s worrying about that bank coming down and shifting the water. Well, he don’t know, but it came down in the night last night and we’re already almost an island. Look out the window.”

  I did, cold apprehension clutching at my insides. The creek had water in it. Not a trickle, but a wide, stainless-steel roadbed of water that was heavy with red silt where it escaped the color of the down-pressing clouds. I ran to the other window. A narrow hogback led through the interlacing of a thousand converging streams, off into the soggy grayness of the mountain beyond us. It was the trail—the hilltop trail Glory and Seth took to Skagmore.

  “I hate to ask it of you,” said Glory. “Especially after telling you off like I did, but we gotta get outa here. We gotta save what we can and hole up at the mine. You better start praying now that it’ll be a few days more before the water gets that high. Meanwhile, grab your bedroll and git goin’.”

  I gaped at her and then at the water outside and, running to my cot, grabbed up the limp worn bedding and started for the door.

  “Hold it! Hold it!” she called. “Fold the stuff so you can manage it. Put on this old hat of Seth’s. It’ll keep the rain outa your eyes for a while, maybe. Wait’ll I get my load made up. I’ll take the lead.”

  Oh, no! Oh, no! I cried to myself as panic trembled my hands and hampered my folding the bedclothes. Why is this happening to me? Wasn’t it enough to take Thann away? Why should I have to suffer any more?

  “Ready?” Glory’s intent eyes peered across her load. “Hope you’ve been praying. If you haven’t, you better get started. We gotta make it there and back. Seth’s gotta rest some before he tackles it.”

  “But I can lift!” I cried. “I don’t have to walk! I have my shield. I don’t have to get wet! I can go—”

  “Go then,” said Glory, her voice hard and unfriendly. “Git goin’!”

  I caught at my panic and bit my lips—I needed Glory. “I only mean I could take your load and mine, too,” I said, which wasn’t what I had originally meant at all. “Then you could take something else. I can transport all this stuff and keep it dry.”

  I lifted my own burden and hovered it while I took hers from her reluctant arms. I lifted the two together and maneuvered the load out the door, extending my personal shield to cover it all. “How—how do I get there?” My voice was little and scared.

  “Follow the hogback,” said Glory, her voice still unwarmed, as though she had been able to catch my hidden emotion, as the People do. “You’ll see the entrance up the hill a ways soon as you top out on the ridge. Don’t go too far inside. The shoring’s rotted out in lots of places.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll come back.”

  “Stay there,” said Glory. “Git goin’. I gotta get Seth up.” My eyes followed hers and recoiled from the little brown snake of water that had welled up in one corner of the room. I got going.

  Even inside my shield, I winced away from the sudden increased roar of descending rain. I couldn’t see a yard ahead and had to navigate from boulder to boulder along the hogback. It was a horrible eternity before I saw the dark gap of the mine entrance and managed to get myself and my burden inside. For several feet around the low irregular arch of the entrance, the powdery ground was soggy mud, but farther back it was dry and the roof vaulted up until it was fairly spacious.

  I put the bedding down and looked around me. Two narrow strips of rail disappeared back into the mine and an ore car tilted drunkenly off one side, two wheels off and half covered with dirt on the floor beside it. I unearthed one wheel and, tugging it upright, rolled it, wobbling and uncooperative, over to the stack of bedding. I started heating the wheel, making slow work of so large a task because I had done so little with the basic Signs and Persuasions—the practices of my People.

  Suddenly it seemed to me a long time since I’d left the shack. I ran to the entrance and peered out. No Glory or Seth! Where could they be! I couldn’t be all alone here with no one around to help me! I swished out into the storm so fast my face was splattered with rain before my shielding was complete. Time and again I almost lost the hogback. It was an irregular chain of rocky little islands back toward the shack. I groped through the downpour, panting to Child Within, Oh, wait! Oh, wait! You can’t come now! And tried to ignore a vague, growing discomfort.

  Then the miracle happened! High above me I heard the egg-beater whirr of a helicopter! Rescue! Now all this mad rush and terror and discomfort would be over. All I had to do was signal the craft and make them take me aboard and take me somewhere away—I turned to locate it and signal it to me when I suddenly realized that I couldn’t lift to it—I couldn’t lift around Outsiders who would matter. This basic rule of The People was too deeply engrained in me. Hastily I dipped down until I perched precariously on one of the still-exposed boulders of the trail. I waved wildly up at the slow swinging ‘copter. They had to see me! “Here I am! Here I am!” I cried, my voice too choked even to carry a yard. “Help me! Help me!” And, in despair as the ‘copter slanted away into the gray falling rain, I slid past vocal calling into subvocal and spread my call over the whole band, praying that a receptor somewhere would pick up my message. “There’s need!” I sobbed out the old childish distress cry of the Group. “There’s need!”

  And an answer came!

  “One of us?” The thought came startled. “Who are you? Where are you?”

  “I’m down here in the rain!” I sobbed, aloud as well as silently. “I’m Debbie! I used to live in the Canyon! We went to the Home. Come and get me! Oh, come and get me!”

  “I’m coming,” came the answer. “What on Earth are you doing on Earth, Debbie? No one was supposed to return so lightly—”

  “So lightly!” Shattered laughter jabbed at my throat. All the time I’d spent on Earth already had erased itself, and I was caught up by the poignancy of this moment of meeting with Thann not here—this watery welcome to Earth with no welcome for Thann. “Who are you?” I asked. I had forgotten individual thought patterns so soon.

  “I’m Jemmy,” came the reply. “I’m with an Outsider Disaster Unit. We’ve got our hands full fishing people out of this dammed lake!” He chuckled. “Serves them right for damming Cougar Creek and spoiling the Canyon. But tell me, what’s the deal? You shouldn’t be here. You went back to the Home, didn’t you?”

  “The Home—” I burst into tears and all the rest of the time that the ‘copter circled back and found a settling-down space on a flat already awash with two inches of water, Jemmy and I talked. Mostly I did the talking. We shifted out of verbalization and our thoughts speeded up until I had told Jemmy everything that had happened to me since that awful crashing day. It was telling of someone else—some other far, sad story of tragedy and graceless destitution—Outsider makeshifts. I had just finished when the ‘copter door swung open and Jemmy stepped out to hover above the water that was sucking my sneakers off the slant of the boulder I was crouched on.

  “Oh, thanks be to The Power,” I cried, grabbing for Jemmy’s hands, but stubbing my own on my personal shield. “Oh take me out of this, Jemmy! Take me back to The People! I
’m so sick of living like an Outsider! And Child Within doesn’t want to be born on a dirt floor in a mine! Oh, Jemmy! How horrible to be an Outsider! You came just in time!” Tears of thankfulness wet my face as I tried to smile at him.

  “Debbie!”

  Surely that couldn’t be my name! That cold, hard, accusing word! That epithet—that—

  “Jemmy!” I collapsed my shield and reached for him. Unbelievably, he would not receive me. “Jemmy!” I cried, the rain wetting my lips. “What’s the matter? What’s wrong?”

  He floated back so I couldn’t reach him. “Where are Glory and Seth?” he asked sternly.

  “Glory and Seth?” I had to think before I could remember them. They were another life ago. “Why, back at the cabin, I guess.” I was bewildered. “Why?”

  “You have no concern for them?” he asked. “You ask for rescue and forget them? What did The Home do to you? You’re apparently not one of Us any more. If you’ve been infected with some sort of virus, we want no spreading of it.”

  “You don’t want me?” I was dazed. “You’re going to leave me here! But—but you can’t! You’ve got to take me!”

  “You’re not drowning,” he said coldly. “Go back to the cave. I have a couple of blankets in the ‘copter I can spare. Be comfortable. I have other people who need rescue worse.”

  “But, Jemmy! I don’t understand. What’s wrong? What have I done?” My heart was shattering and cutting me to pieces with its razor-sharp edges.

  He looked at me coldly and speculatively. “If you have to ask, it’d take too long to explain,” he said. He turned away and took the blankets from the ‘copter. He aimed them at the mine entrance and, hovering them, gave them a shove to carry them through into the mine.

  “There,” he said, “curl up in your comfort. Don’t get your feet wet.”

  “Oh, Jemmy, don’t leave me! Help me!” I was in a state of almost complete collapse, darkness roaring over me.

  “While you’re curled up, all nice and safe,” Jemmy’s voice came back to me from the ‘copter, “you might try thinking a little on ‘Just who on Earth do you think you are!’ And if you think you have the answer to that, try, ‘I was hungry—’ “

  I didn’t hear him go. I sat hunched in my sodden misery, too far gone even to try to puzzle it all out. All my hopes had been built on when my People would find me. They’d set everything right. I would be freed from all my worry and hardships—and now—and now—

  A wave of discomfort that had been building up slowly for some time suddenly surged over me and my fingers whitened as I clutched the rock. How could I have mistaken that other pain for this? “Glory!” I whimpered. “It’s Child Within!” Now I could remember Glory and Seth. I was back in the miserable half-life of waiting for my People. I scrambled to my feet and closed my shield, setting it to warmth to counteract the chill that stuck to my bones. “I can’t face it alone! Anything, anything is better than being alone!”

  I streaked back along the hogback that had almost disappeared under the creeping muddy tide. The cabin was in a lake. The back door was ajar. The whole thing tilted slightly off true as though it were thinking of taking off into the roar of the incredible river that swept the creek bed from bank to bank. I staggered against the door as another hard surge of pain tightened my hands and wrung an involuntary cry from me.

  When it subsided, I wiped the sweat from my upper lip and pushed the door further open. I stepped into the magnified roaring of the rain on the roof. Blue light was flooding serenely from the baking powder can on the table in the empty kitchen. I snatched it up and ran to the bedroom.

  Seth lay white and unmoving on his bed, his eyes sunken, his chest still. I pressed the back of my clenched hand hard against my mouth, feeling the bruise of my teeth. “Oh, no!” I whispered, and gasped with relief as a quick shallow breath lifted the one thin quilt Glory had left him from the bundle of bedding.

  “You came back.”

  My eyes flew to Glory. She sat on the other side of the bed, a shoe box in her lap, one hand clutching a corner of the battered old quilt.

  “You didn’t come,” I whispered. “I waited.”

  “No need to whisper.” Her voice was quite as usual except for a betraying catch on the last word. “He can’t hear you.”

  “But you must come!” I cried. “The house will go in a minute. The creek’s already—”

  “Why should I come,” she asked without emphasis. “He can’t come.”

  We both watched another of the shaken breaths come and go.

  “But you’ll be washed away—”

  “So’ll you if you don’t git goin’.” She turned her face away from me.

  “But, Glory—” Her name came, but twisted—a muffled cry of pain. I clenched both hands on the doorjamb and clung until the pain subsided.

  “Child Within,” said Glory—her eyes intent on me.

  “Yes,” I gasped. “I guess so.”

  Glory stood up and laid the shoe box on the corner of the sagging dresser. She leaned over and smoothed the covers under Seth’s chin. “I’ll be back,” she told him. She waded through the ruffle of water that covered the floor ankle-deep and rounded the bed.

  “We better go,” she said. “You’ll have to point me the way. The trail’s gone—”

  “You mean you’d leave him here alone!” I was stunned. “Your own husband!”

  She looked back at Seth and her lips tightened. “We all die alone, anyway,” she said. “He’d tell me to go, if’n he could.”

  Then I was still as I caught the passionate outpouring of her grief and love—her last, unspoken farewell to Seth. With an effort she turned her eyes back to me. “Our duty’s to the living,” she said. “And Child Within won’t wait.”

  “Oh, Glory!” Anguish of sorrow filled my chest till I could only gasp again. “Oh, Glory! We can’t, we can’t!” My throat ached and I blinked against tears of quite a different sort than those I’d been shedding since Thann died.

  I snatched the glowing nickel out of the baking powder can and shoved it into my pocket. “Tuck him in good,” I said, nodding at Seth. “Bring whatever you need.”

  Glory looked at me briefly, hope flaring in her eyes, then, with hasty shaken hands, she tucked the covers tight around Seth and, grabbing up her shoe box, she pushed it under the covers next to him. There was a grating grind and the whole shack swung a quarter circle around.

  “Can we get the bed through the doors?” I asked shrilly.

  “Not unless we take it apart,” said Glory, the quietness of her voice steadying me, “and there isn’t time.”

  “Then—then—”

  “The mattress will bend,” she said. “If both of us—”

  With all my faith and power I withdrew into the Quiet within me. Help me now, I prayed. I can do nothing of myself. Strengthen me, guide me, help me—

  The last words came audibly as I clutched the foot of the bed, waiting until the wave subsided. Then, slowly, deliberately, quietly and unhurried, I lifted the mattress Seth lay on and bent its edges enough to get it out of the bedroom. I hovered it in the kitchen. Glory and I both staggered as the house swayed underfoot—swayed and steadied.

  “Have you something to put over him to keep the rain off?” I asked. “I can’t extend my shield that far and lift that much at the same time.”

  “Our slickers,” said Glory, her eyes intent on me with that different look in them. “They’ll help a little.”

  “Get them then,” I said, “and you’ll have to get on the mattress, too, to keep him covered.”

  “But can you—” Glory began.

  “I will,” I said, holding my Quietness carefully in my mind. “Hurry—the house is going.”

  Hastily, Glory snatched the two yellow slickers from the nails behind the front door. She scrambled into one and spread the other over Seth. “His head, too,” I said, “or he’ll nearly drown. You’d better cover your head, too. It’ll be easier to take. Hurry! Hurry!”<
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  Glory gave one look at the hovering mattress and, setting her lips grimly, crawled on and lay beside Seth, one arm protectively across his chest. She’d hardly closed her eyes before I started the mattress out the door. The house began spinning at the same time. By the time we got outside, it had turned completely around and, as we left it, it toppled slowly into the creek and was lost in the tumult of the waters.

  It’s no more than the windows and siding, I whispered to myself. In fact, it’s less because there’s no glass to break. But all my frantic reassurances didn’t help much. There were still two lives hanging on my ability to do the inanimate lift and transport them. Doggedly I pushed on, hardly able to see beyond the cascade of rain that arched down my shield. Below me the waters were quieting because they were getting so deep that they no longer quarreled with the boulders and ridges. They smothered them to silence. Ahead and a little below me, rain ran from Glory and Seth’s slickers, and the bed, other than where they lay, was a sodden mess.